How do you search on Google? Do you type a few keywords and scan the results, or do you ask it a full question, the way you'd ask a person? Has that changed at all in the past year? If so, you’re not alone.
Search is changing, driven by two forces colliding: traditional search engines are embedding AI results, and AI chatbots are incorporating real-time web search. They're converging on the same thing: AI-powered search.
We touched on search behavior in our recent post on how AI is changing the consumer journey. Here, we go deeper, looking at what's happening on Google in more detail, using behavioral data from our US and UK panels.
Average monthly Google searches per person are up 26% in the UK and 37% in the US compared to May 2025, meaning people are turning to Google more than ever – despite the option of chatbots that could arguably answer at least some of those queries. But it's not just volume: there are signals that the style of those searches is changing in AI-influenced ways.
Search length is steadily increasing month by month: the average search length is up 8% from last May in both markets (from 24 to 26 characters in the US and 21 to 26 in the UK). More telling: the share of searches over 30 characters has grown 24% in the UK and 17% in the US. Searches over 40 characters show a similar trend, suggesting the shift is a genuine move toward longer, more descriptive queries.
Across both the US and UK, a growing share of Google searches now start with question words — who, what, where, when, why. Growth is led by "what," "is," "when," "where," and "why," all classic information-seeking queries that AI chatbots handle well.
On a smaller scale, conversational filler words (e.g., "basically," "kind of") and instructional phrases (e.g., "explain," "tell me," "compare") that resemble the kind of directions one might give to a chatbot are also growing, though from a much smaller base.
You might assume that there’s one group that’s driving this: heavy chatbot users, bringing those conversational habits to Google. But this doesn’t appear to be the case: these Google-search changes are consistent across heavy users (top 25% by frequency), light users, and non-users of ChatGPT alike. This suggests the shift is more systemic, and that Google itself has altered the search incentive structure: where concise keyword-based searches were once rewarded with accurate results, conversational queries now elicit more AI overviews. These AI overviews have changed what effective search behavior looks like, and users are adapting regardless of whether they use standalone AI tools.
There's a second force at work here: cognitive offloading. As people trust external systems more, they tend to offload more thinking work to them, using them to help solve problems rather than just complete rote tasks. More searches, longer queries, more exploratory phrasing: all of it is consistent with people leaning on Google search as a thinking partner.
We classified search intent across two time periods (May 2025 and March 2026) and found the composition remained remarkably consistent across informational, navigational, commercial and transactional searches. There's no sign here that people are offloading informational searches to AI chatbots and using Google only to navigate to specific sites. This aligns with independent research on search intent from Rand Fishkin at SparkToro, who concluded that intent composition has plateaued — not because search behavior has stopped evolving, but because Google has gotten so good at answering informational queries instantly (and without a click) that those searches stay in Google rather than migrating to chatbots. In short, people aren't searching for different things, they're just expressing the same needs more conversationally.
Search shapes what consumers find, what they click, and ultimately what they buy. Behavioral data can help you see important shifts in real time:
How people search is changing – not dramatically, but persistently. The question is whether brands have the data to see it.
